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Habsburg Monarchy coat of arms post 1780

The Habsburg Monarchy (or Habsburg
Empire) covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of
Habsburg (1278–1780), and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine (since 1780), between
1526 and 1867/1918. The capital was mainly Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611,[1]
when the capital was Prague.
The monarchy from 1804 to 1867 is usually referred to as the "Austrian
Empire" and from 1867 to 1918 as "Austria-Hungary".

The head of the House of Habsburg was usually also the ruler of
the Holy
Roman Empire from 1440 until its dissolution in 1806. However,
the two entities should not be considered coterminous, as the Habsburg Empire
covered many lands beyond the Holy Roman Empire, and not all of the
Holy Roman Empire was de facto under direct Habsburg
control at any given time. In some contexts, the term "Habsburg
Empire" might also refer to extended Habsburg family possessions
once ruled solely by Charles V, Holy Roman
Emperor, or to the Spanish Empire ruled by the senior Spanish branch of
the house.

Contents

Terminology

Habsburg possessions at one of her largest extents under Charles V in 1547

Names of the territory that (with some exceptions) finally
became Austria-Hungary:

Habsburg monarchy or Austrian monarchy (1526–1867):
This was an unofficial, but very frequent name – even at that time.
The entity had no official
name. Note that technically the term "Habsburg monarchy" can
also refer to the period 1276–1918 when the Habsburgs ruled in the
monarchy (archduchy) centered in present-day Austria
and "Austrian monarchy" can refer to the monarchy centered in
present-day Austria 1156–1867, but both terms are usually not used
this way.

Austrian Empire (1804–1867):
This was the official name. Note that the German version is
Kaisertum Österreich, i.e. the English translation empire
refers to a territory ruled by an emperor, not just to a "widespreading domain",
more accurately the "Emperordom of Austria".

Austria-Hungary or
Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918): This was the
official name. An unofficial popular name was the Danubian
Monarchy (German: Donaumonarchie) also often used was
the term Doppel-Monarchie ("Double Monarchy") meaning two
states under one crowned ruler.

Crownlands or crown lands
(Kronländer) (1849–1918): This is the
name of all the individual parts of the Austrian Empire (since
1849) and then of Austria-Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary (more
exactly the Lands of the Hungarian Crown) was not
considered a "crownland" anymore after the establishment of
Austria-Hungary 1867, so that the "crownlands" became identical
with what was called the Kingdoms and Lands represented in
the Imperial Council (Die im Reichsrate vertretenen
Königreiche und Länder).

The Hungarian parts of the Empire were called "Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint
Stephen" or "Lands of Holy (St.) Stephen's Crown" (Länder
der Heiligen Stephans Krone).
The Bohemian (Czech) Lands were called "Lands of the St.
Wenceslaus' Crown" (Länder der Wenzels-Krone).

Austrian lands (Österreichische
Länder) or "Archduchies of Austria" (Erzherzogtümer von
Österreich) - Lands up and below the Enns (ober und unter
der Enns) (996–1918): This is the historical name of the parts
of the Archduchy of Austria that became the present-day "Republic
of Austria" (Republik Österreich) on 12 November 1918
(after Emperor Charles I had abdicated the throne). Modern day
Austria is a semi-federal republic of nine states
(Bundesländer) that are: Lower Austria, Upper Austria,
Tyrol, Styria, Salzburg, Carinthia, Voralrlberg and Burgenland and
the Capital of Vienna that is a state of its own. Burgenland, came to
Austria in 1921 by a referendum from Hungary. Salzburg finally became Austrian in 1816 after
Napoleonic wars (before it was ruled by prince-archbishops of Salzburg as an
sovereign territory).

Vienna, Austria's capital became a state January 1, 1922, after
being residence and capital of the Austrian Empire (Reichshaupt
und Residenzstadt Wien) for the Habsburg monarchs for
centuries. Upper and Lower Austria, historically, were split into
"Austria above the Enns" and "Austria below the Enns" (the Enns
river is the state-border between Upper- and Lower Austria). Upper
Austria was enlarged after the Treaty of Teschen (1779) following
the "War of the Bavarian Succession" by the so-called Innviertel ("Inn
Quarter"), formerly part of Bavaria.

Hereditary Lands
(Erblande or
Erbländer; mostly used
Österreichische Erblande) or German Hereditary
Lands (in the Austrian monarchy) or Austrian
Hereditary Lands (Middle Ages – 1849/1918): In a narrower
sense these were the "original" Habsburg Austrian territories, i.e.
basically the Austrian lands and Carniola (not Galicia, Italian
territories or the Austrian
Netherlands).
In a wider sense the Lands of
the Bohemian Crown were also included in (from 1526; definitely
from 1620/27) the Hereditary lands. The term was replaced by the
term "Crownlands" (see above) in the 1849 March Constitution, but
it was also used afterwards.
The Erblande also included lots of small and smallest
territories that were principalities, duchies or counties etc. some
of them can namely be found in the reigning titles of the Habsburg
monarchs like Graf (Earl/Count of) von Tyrol
etc.

Territories

Growth of the Habsburg Monarchy

The territories ruled by the branch changed over the centuries,
but the core always consisted of four blocs:

The Hereditary Lands, which covered most of
the modern states of Austria
and Slovenia, as well as
territories in northeastern Italy and (before 1797) southwestern Germany. To these were added in
1779 the Inn Quarter
of Bavaria; and in 1803 the
Bishoprics of Trent and Brixen.
The Napoleonic
Wars caused disruptions where many parts of the Hereditary
lands were lost, but all these, along with the former Archbishopric of Salzburg,
which had previously been temporarily annexed between 1805 and
1809, were recovered at the peace in 1815, with the exception of
the Vorlande. The Hereditary provinces included:

The County
of Tyrol (although the Bishoprics of Trent and Brixen dominated
what would become the South Tyrol before 1803);

The Vorarlberg
(actually a collection of provinces, only united in the 19th
century);

The Vorlande, a group of territories in Breisgau and elsewhere in southwestern Germany
lost in 1797 (although the Alsatian territories (Sundgau) which had formed a part of it had been
lost as early as 1648);

Vorarlberg and the Vorlande were often grouped together as Further Austria
and mostly ruled jointly with Tyrol.

The Kingdom of Hungary –
Hungary had lost some two thirds of its territory to the Ottoman Empire
and the Princes of Transylvania, while the Habsburgs were
restricted to the western and northern fringes of the former
kingdom, called Royal Hungary at that time. In
1699, at the end of the Ottoman-Habsburg
wars, almost the whole former kingdom came under Austrian rule,
with the rest being picked up in 1718. For much of its existence,
the Kingdom of Hungary included the area of the present-day Republic of Hungary, Slovakia, Transylvania[3] in what
is now Romania, most of Croatia, the area of today's Vojvodina province in Serbia, and Carpathian
Ruthenia, a small trans-Carpathian region now in Ukraine. Between 1718 and 1739,
various other Balkan territories, including the area around Belgrade and parts of western
Wallachia, were also
attached, but were lost following an unsuccessful war with Turkey
in 1739. Much of the area bordering the Ottoman Empire was
separated out from Hungarian administration and formed into the Military
Frontier, which was ruled directly from Vienna. Croatia and
Slavonia, later Croatia-Slavoinia was an autonomous part of the
Kingdom of Hungary[4][5][6][7],
although Slavonia fell under Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 16th
century and was retaken in the early 17th century.

Over the course of its history, other lands were, at times,
under Austrian Habsburg rule (some of these territories were
secundo-genitures, i.e. ruled by other lines of Habsburg
dynasty):

The boundaries of some of these territories varied over the time
period indicated, and others were ruled by a subordinate
(secundo-geniture) Habsburg line. The Habsburgs also held the title
of Holy
Roman Emperor between 1438 and 1740, and again from 1745 to
1806.

Characteristics

The various Habsburg possessions never really formed a single
country - each province was governed according to its own
particular customs. Until the mid 17th century, all of the
provinces were not even necessarily ruled by the same person -
junior members of the family often ruled portions of the Hereditary
Lands as private apanages. Serious attempts at centralization began
under Maria Theresa and especially
her son Joseph II in the mid to
late 18th century, but many of these were abandoned following large
scale resistance to Joseph's more radical reform attempts, although
a more cautious policy of centralization continued during the
revolutionary period and the long Metternichianperiod which followed.

An even greater attempt at centralization began in 1849
following the suppression of the various revolutions of
1848. For the first time, ministers tried to transform the
monarchy into a centralized bureaucratic state ruled from Vienna.
The Kingdom of Hungary, in particular, ceased to exist as a
separate entity, being divided into a series of districts.
Following the Habsburg defeats in the Wars of 1859 and 1866, this
policy was abandoned, and after several years of experimentation in
the early 1860s, the famous Austro-Hungarian
Compromise of 1867 was arrived at, by which the so-called Dual
Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was set up. In this system,
the Kingdom of Hungary was given sovereignty and a parliament, with
only a personal union and a joint foreign and military policy
connecting it to the other Habsburg lands. Although the
non-Hungarian Habsburg lands, often, but erroneously, referred to
as "Austria," received their own central parliament (the
Reichsrat, or Imperial Council) and ministries, as
their official name - the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in
the Imperial Council - shows that they remained something
less than a genuine unitary state. When Bosnia and Herzegovina were
annexed (after a long period of occupation and administration),
they were not incorporated into either half of the monarchy.
Instead, they were governed by the joint ministry of finance.

Austria-Hungary collapsed under the weight of the various
unsolved ethnic problems that came to a head with its defeat in World War I. In the
peace settlement that followed, significant territories were ceded
to Romania and Italy, new republics of Austria (the German-Austrian
territories of the Hereditary lands) and Hungary (the Magyar core of the old kingdom)
were created, and the remainder of the monarchy's territory was
shared out among the new states of Poland, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
(later Yugoslavia), and Czechoslovakia.

Habsburg
territories outside the Habsburg Monarchy

The Habsburg monarchy should not be confused with various other
territories ruled at different times by members of the Habsburg
dynasty. The senior Spanish line of the Habsburgs ruled over Spain and various other territories
from 1516 until it became extinct in 1700. A junior line ruled over
Tuscany between 1765 and
1801, and again from 1814 to 1859. While exiled from Tuscany, this
line ruled at Salzburg from 1803 to 1805, and in Würzburg from 1805 to
1814. Another line ruled the Vorlande from 1803 to 1805, and Modena from 1814 to 1859, while Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon's second wife and the
daughter of Austrian Emperor Francis, ruled over the Duchy of Parma
between 1814 and 1847. Also, the Second Mexican Empire, from
1863–1867, was headed by Maximilian I of Mexico, the
brother of Franz Josef II. The daughter of Francis II,
Maria Leopoldine, was married to the first emperor of Brazil, Pedro
I. The arrangement resulted in a large immigration from the various
people living within the borders of the Austrian Empire to
Brazil.

The Habsburg Monarchy (or Habsburg Empire) covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg (1278–1780), and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine (from 1780), between 1526 and 1867/1918. The Imperial capital was Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611,[2] when it was moved to Prague. The monarchy from 1804 to 1867 is usually referred to as the "Austrian Empire" and from 1867 to 1918 as "Austria-Hungary".

The head of the House of Habsburg was usually also the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 until its dissolution in 1806. However, the two entities should not be considered coterminous, as the Habsburg Empire covered many lands beyond the Holy Roman Empire, and not all of the Holy Roman Empire was de facto under direct Habsburg control at any given time. In some contexts, the term "Habsburg Empire" might also refer to extended Habsburg family possessions once ruled solely by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, or to the Spanish Empire ruled by the senior Spanish branch of the house.

Contents

Terminology

Names of the territory that (with some exceptions) finally became Austria-Hungary:

Habsburg monarchy or Austrian monarchy (1526–1867): This was an unofficial, but very frequent name – even at that time. The entity had no official name. Note that technically the term "Habsburg monarchy" can also refer to the period 1276–1918 when the Habsburgs ruled in the monarchy (archduchy) centered in present-day Austria and "Austrian monarchy" can refer to the monarchy centered in present-day Austria 1156–1867, but both terms are usually not used this way.

Austrian Empire (1804–1867): This was the official name. Note that the German version is Kaisertum Österreich, i.e. the English translation empire refers to a territory ruled by an emperor, not just to a "widespreading domain", more accurately the "Emperordom of Austria".

Austria-Hungary or Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918): This was the official name. An unofficial popular name was the Danubian Monarchy (German: Donaumonarchie) also often used was the term Doppel-Monarchie ("Double Monarchy") meaning two states under one crowned ruler.

Crownlands or crown lands (Kronländer) (1849–1918): This is the name of all the individual parts of the Austrian Empire (since 1849) and then of Austria-Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary (more exactly the Lands of the Hungarian Crown) was not considered a "crownland" anymore after the establishment of Austria-Hungary 1867, so that the "crownlands" became identical with what was called the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Imperial Council (Die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder).

The Hungarian parts of the Empire were called "Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen" or "Lands of Holy (St.) Stephen's Crown" (Länder der Heiligen Stephans Krone). The Bohemian (Czech) Lands were called "Lands of the St. Wenceslaus' Crown" (Länder der Wenzels-Krone).

Austrian lands (Österreichische Länder) or "Archduchies of Austria" (Erzherzogtümer von Österreich) - Lands up and below the Enns (ober und unter der Enns) (996–1918): This is the historical name of the parts of the Archduchy of Austria that became the present-day "Republic of Austria" (Republik Österreich) on 12 November 1918 (after Emperor Charles I had abdicated the throne). Modern day Austria is a semi-federal republic of nine states (Bundesländer) that are: Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Tyrol, Styria, Salzburg, Carinthia, Voralrlberg and Burgenland and the Capital of Vienna that is a state of its own. Burgenland came to Austria in 1921 from Hungary. Salzburg finally became Austrian in 1816 after Napoleonic wars (before it was ruled by prince-archbishops of Salzburg as an sovereign territory).

Vienna, Austria's capital became a state January 1, 1922, after being residence and capital of the Austrian Empire (Reichshaupt und Residenzstadt Wien) for the Habsburg monarchs for centuries. Upper and Lower Austria, historically, were split into "Austria above the Enns" and "Austria below the Enns" (the Enns river is the state-border between Upper- and Lower Austria). Upper Austria was enlarged after the Treaty of Teschen (1779) following the "War of the Bavarian Succession" by the so-called Innviertel ("Inn Quarter"), formerly part of Bavaria.

Hereditary Lands (Erblande or Erbländer; mostly used Österreichische Erblande) or German Hereditary Lands (in the Austrian monarchy) or Austrian Hereditary Lands (Middle Ages – 1849/1918): In a narrower sense these were the "original" Habsburg Austrian territories, i.e. basically the Austrian lands and Carniola (not Galicia, Italian territories or the Austrian Netherlands). In a wider sense the Lands of the Bohemian Crown were also included in (from 1526; definitely from 1620/27) the Hereditary lands. The term was replaced by the term "Crownlands" (see above) in the 1849 March Constitution, but it was also used afterwards. The Erblande also included lots of small and smallest territories that were principalities, duchies or counties etc. some of them can namely be found in the reigning titles of the Habsburg monarchs like Graf (Earl/Count of) von Tyrol etc.

Territories

The territories ruled by the branch changed over the centuries, but the core always consisted of four blocs:

The Hereditary Lands, which covered most of the modern states of Austria and Slovenia, as well as territories in northeastern Italy and (before 1797) southwestern Germany. To these were added in 1779 the Inn Quarter of Bavaria; and in 1803 the Bishoprics of Trent and Brixen. The Napoleonic Wars caused disruptions where many parts of the Hereditary lands were lost, but all these, along with the former Archbishopric of Salzburg, which had previously been temporarily annexed between 1805 and 1809, were recovered at the peace in 1815, with the exception of the Vorlande. The Hereditary provinces included:

The County of Tyrol (although the Bishoprics of Trent and Brixen dominated what would become the South Tyrol before 1803);

The Vorarlberg (actually a collection of provinces, only united in the 19th century);

The Vorlande, a group of territories in Breisgau and elsewhere in southwestern Germany lost in 1801 (although the Alsatian territories (Sundgau) which had formed a part of it had been lost as early as 1648);

Vorarlberg and the Vorlande were often grouped together as Further Austria and mostly ruled jointly with Tyrol.

The Kingdom of Hungary – Hungary had lost some two thirds of its territory to the Ottoman Empire and the Princes of Transylvania, while the Habsburgs were restricted to the western and northern fringes of the former kingdom, called Royal Hungary at that time. In 1699, at the end of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars, almost the whole former kingdom came under Austrian rule, with the rest being picked up in 1718. For much of its existence, the Kingdom of Hungary included the area of the present-day Republic of Hungary, Slovakia, Transylvania[4] in what is now Romania, most of Croatia, the area of today's Vojvodina province in Serbia, and Carpathian Ruthenia, a small trans-Carpathian region now in Ukraine. Between 1718 and 1739, various other Balkan territories, including the area around Belgrade and parts of western Wallachia, were also attached, but were lost following an unsuccessful war with Turkey in 1739. Much of the area bordering the Ottoman Empire was separated out from Hungarian administration and formed into the Military Frontier, which was ruled directly from Vienna. Croatia and Slavonia, later Croatia-Slavoinia was an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Hungary, although Slavonia fell under Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 16th century and was retaken in the early 17th century.

The boundaries of some of these territories varied over the time period indicated, and others were ruled by a subordinate (secundo-geniture) Habsburg line. The Habsburgs also held the title of Holy Roman Emperor between 1438 and 1740, and again from 1745 to 1806.

Characteristics

The various Habsburg possessions never really formed a single country - each province was governed according to its own particular customs. Until the mid 17th century, all of the provinces were not even necessarily ruled by the same person - junior members of the family often ruled portions of the Hereditary Lands as private apanages. Serious attempts at centralization began under Maria Theresa and especially her son Joseph II in the mid to late 18th century, but many of these were abandoned following large scale resistance to Joseph's more radical reform attempts, although a more cautious policy of centralization continued during the revolutionary period and the long Metternichianperiod which followed.

An even greater attempt at centralization began in 1849 following the suppression of the various revolutions of 1848. For the first time, ministers tried to transform the monarchy into a centralized bureaucratic state ruled from Vienna. The Kingdom of Hungary, in particular, ceased to exist as a separate entity, being divided into a series of districts. Following the Habsburg defeats in the Wars of 1859 and 1866, this policy was abandoned, and after several years of experimentation in the early 1860s, the famous Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was arrived at, by which the so-called Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was set up. In this system, the Kingdom of Hungary was given sovereignty and a parliament, with only a personal union and a joint foreign and military policy connecting it to the other Habsburg lands. Although the non-Hungarian Habsburg lands, often, but erroneously, referred to as "Austria," received their own central parliament (the Reichsrat, or Imperial Council) and ministries, as their official name - the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council - shows that they remained something less than a genuine unitary state. When Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed (after a long period of occupation and administration), they were not incorporated into either half of the monarchy. Instead, they were governed by the joint ministry of finance.

Austria-Hungary collapsed under the weight of the various unsolved ethnic problems that came to a head with its defeat in World War I. In the peace settlement that followed, significant territories were ceded to Romania and Italy, new republics of Austria (the German-Austrian territories of the Hereditary lands) and Hungary (the Magyar core of the old kingdom) were created, and the remainder of the monarchy's territory was shared out among the new states of Poland, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), and Czechoslovakia.

Habsburg territories outside the Habsburg Monarchy

The Habsburg monarchy should not be confused with various other territories ruled at different times by members of the Habsburg dynasty. The senior Spanish line of the Habsburgs ruled over Spain and various other territories from 1516 until it became extinct in 1700. A junior line ruled over Tuscany between 1765 and 1801, and again from 1814 to 1859. While exiled from Tuscany, this line ruled at Salzburg from 1803 to 1805, and in Würzburg from 1805 to 1814. Another line ruled the Vorlande from 1803 to 1805, and Modena from 1814 to 1859, while Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon's second wife and the daughter of Austrian Emperor Francis, ruled over the Duchy of Parma between 1814 and 1847. Also, the Second Mexican Empire, from 1863–1867, was headed by Maximilian I of Mexico, the brother of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.